ROS Longevity: Small Changes=Big Difference

Traders are a minority, and people in trade channels are a minority. Seems like people would fill their friends lists with anyone and everyone ever encountered in a trade channel or forum.

Oh allmighty master of numbers, please share a link with us to the statistics that show that traders are a minority.

Simple deduction Watson.

1.) Most players are casual.
2.) Casuals usually don't want to waste time spamming chat/forums for trading.
3.) Many non casuals such as myself don't give a flying Fuck about trading. In fact I only traded (not counting friend buffing/buffs from friends) like 4x ever in Diablo 2.
4.) AH <> trading

i) For Blizzard = sold copy -> they made money
ii) For Gamers = more items -> items for the end game are available for cheaper prices

Now please try and give one good reason why a bot is a bad thing for anyone.

Spoken like a true botter.

Or maybe an open minded person? No?
When the gaming society evolves, games will include automated botting as a feature, but it will take a while, till we are there.

1) Bots go against the rules of the game, in that there is no skill involved, just a cheating program that does all the grinding for you
2) Bots inflate prices of the economy in general, since they produce so much more gold then can naturally be collected
3) Bots dehumanize the trading market, causing the game to be less social, and thus less fun
4) Bots find loot not for the sake of finding and using loot, but for the sake of selling it. Normally selling items is fine, but that's only because you sell some of the good stuff you find, not all of it. This overflow of good items causes it to be too easy to get crafting mats, gold, gems, etc.

1) Bots don't break any rules, they just farm for you and follow the same rules imposed by the game.
2) Because there are bots and they grind for you, items you could probably never ever afford, you can buy cheaply for ingame gold, which you can collect in a reasonable time frame.
3) I don't understand how it has smth. to do with bots. The AH is not personal, it's a very efficient trading market, which is perfect as it is. It's perfect the fewer human elements to this process the more efficient it is. If you want personal trading find some friends and play self found with them, none is restricting you to find a community who enjoys that. It has nothing to do with bots.

D2 trading was awful, many people were not trying to sell items, they were trying to trade for the sake of trading. Offer as little as possible or wanted too be over payed for their stuff, it was hilarious how some just had fun trading and never actually selling everything, but posting their stuff in a forum or trading channel over and over again.

4) Yes that is great for you and every casual player out there, else you would need ages to self find the gear, which lets you play MP10. But now you can do it with a very very low budget, which you can find yourself within a reasonable time frame.

Of course there are still a few almost perfect items, which have really great value. But let's face it you don't need them to farm MP10, you just want them because they are expensive and have a lot of value.

But that is a completely different problem and has little to do with bots. The economies tends to be very efficient, it will always be the same formula:

People who play this game day and night will always have a huge edge against people who don't, because they will find more efficient ways to farm gear and can do it longer. If you only play this a couple hours a day, the gap between you and them will be astronomical.

But don't fear, your friend the botter is here, he farms for you and helps you close that gap, because of bots this gap becomes very small, they find loot for everyone in this game and offer the supply in items to everyone, not only the people who grind this day and night.

It is so funny that a lot of people don't realize this and look for some scape goat, why this game has no end game purpose. It's not the bots or the economy it is the lack of an end game and the concept this game is based on, there is just nothing to play for, the only thing players play for in this game is for farming more efficiently, by the looks of it nothing will change with the release of RoS, the same all over again.

The best of it, if you want a challenge you can still restrict yourself to play self found, no one is stopping you from doing that, it has again absolutely nothing to do with bots.

What would stop people from adding bots owned by third-party sellers to their friend lists?

That's a very good point. I feel like regardless of any situation, if trading is going to happen in any form, there will be bots/3rd party sites. My response would be that if people REALLY want botted/real money items, let them have it because it doesn't affect the economy as a whole, since your economy is limited to 100 friends, and prices and such would only fluctuate because of the 3rd party sites/botters if they were in your social trade economy (if this suggestion were to be put into place).

Right, and 90 / 100 of people's friends will be 3rd party sites who would run thousands of bots. Then those people will just trade to their friends and it would be a chain reaction, then you'll get a lot of people who just spend some money and be BiS.

The argument that "well, just don't buy stuff and the game will last longer" doesn't work. All we have to do is look at the AH economy today. Why on earth would you want to play self found and spend a lot of time farming for legendaries when you can just buy them.

I can guarantee you the norm will turn into having 10-20 bots on your Flist, and when you just can't find that one legendary you want for your build, just buy it! And suddenly ALL the fun is sucked out of the game, just like it is today.

What would stop people from adding bots owned by third-party sellers to their friend lists?

That's a very good point. I feel like regardless of any situation, if trading is going to happen in any form, there will be bots/3rd party sites. My response would be that if people REALLY want botted/real money items, let them have it because it doesn't affect the economy as a whole, since your economy is limited to 100 friends, and prices and such would only fluctuate because of the 3rd party sites/botters if they were in your social trade economy (if this suggestion were to be put into place).

Right, and 90 / 100 of people's friends will be 3rd party sites who would run thousands of bots. Then those people will just trade to their friends and it would be a chain reaction, then you'll get a lot of people who just spend some money and be BiS.

The argument that "well, just don't buy stuff and the game will last longer" doesn't work. All we have to do is look at the AH economy today. Why on earth would you want to play self found and spend a lot of time farming for legendaries when you can just buy them.

I can guarantee you the norm will turn into having 10-20 bots on your Flist, and when you just can't find that one legendary you want for your build, just buy it! And suddenly ALL the fun is sucked out of the game, just like it is today.

Sorry, but I'm on team BoA. There just isn't a better itteration.

How convenient that your AH example disregards the fact that the game is balanced around it.
After the game is balanced around self-found, if some people still want to ruin their own fun by taking shortcuts, be my guest. I won't shed a tear for you.

3rd party site buys 101 accounts. 99 of them are sub botters and are friends with each other putting their list to 98. They all then friend one special bot, and all 100 accounts are linked at 99 /100 friends. That special bot now friends the alpha account, who is now at 1/100 friends. If the website wants to link every batch of farming accounts, then every alpha account will be at 3/100 friends, and there can be as many alpha accounts as the site can buy. You're friends with one of the thousands, you have access to the entire bot economy.

How convenient that your AH example disregards the fact that the game is balanced around it.
After the game is balanced around self-found, if some people still want to ruin their own fun by taking shortcuts, be my guest. I won't shed a tear for you.

Brilliant concept of a game.
Keep looking for this special item you always wanted, when you have it, the game is over because you are bored after a couple of days using it.

I hope you see the problem in that, because it is the problem D3 has right now. There is nothing to do, but to farm, farm some more and then you are done, farm even more and RoS looks the same, just self self found single player mode, but you can farm rifts and farm some more rifts and then farm some more rifts!

There is just a lack of an end game concept, it should be like this:

Now I have that missing piece of the gear I always wanted, the true game can begin now, which I will enjoy for months to come (it doesn't matter how I got it, bought it from hard earned money I deserved from doing a great job, grinded days for it playing the game, or made a trade for an equal item).
This is how it should look like and not how the above example looks like.

It has nothing to do with an AH or the economy or hackers/bots whatever, there is just no end game, which really excites you and pulls you in, because it's all just farming.

Having watched a lot of streams and kept up with the news for ros, I would like to compile some small suggestions I've heard from the whole community here that could revitalize the end-game about: trading, pvpve, drop rates.

Trading

Here is a suggestion I made in another thread, but I would like to reiterate it here:
Make ALL items and currencies trade-able with and only with people that were on your friends list/in your clan when the item dropped. Reasons why this is good:

It builds your personal community, encouraging you to have a lot of friends and interact with them

It encourages social interaction between your friends and your clan (respectively), since you have to communicate with them about the loot, mats, or gold you want to exchange with them

It makes it so random strangers is not a part of D3ROS trading, since the max friends you can have is 100 and thus your trade reach is limited

There would be an incentive to keep farming legendaries, even after you have found all the ones you want for your build, since you will be able to sell/exchange them, still benefitting you to find them

PVPVE

Athene made a video suggesting that this would be a core of the endgame and longevity of D3ROS and that it needed to be implemented. Blizz wants balance, and it just simply doesn't exist in PVP for D3V or D3ROS. Thus, the best middle-ground would be PVPVE, where:

You would fight monsters, or waves of monsters, solo or in a coop game and try to get the best time, the best kill streak, or even just beat a harder pack than the other team.

Both teams (maybe more than 2 teams? tournament?) would play in their own instances at the same time as each other.

There could even be a turn based PVPVE where one team (or solo) plays a level and adds a bunch of difficult modifiers to the level they will play, and then the other team, when they come online next, play that same level, matching the difficulty and seeing who got the best time or score or whatever. It's basically like HORSE in basketball, but in D3ROS.

There could be ranked and unranked games, ranking by clan, etc.

This would be good because it would encourage competitive gameplay in an environment whose balancing is already being done for the PVE in-game. Competition, cooperation, and community interaction would all come from this PVPVE system.

Drop Rates

This one is a small change that will also help the longevity of the game. We know that blue said that the drop rates are boosted for the beta, but I still just wanted to say that finding a legendary should still take some amount of time, not 12 legendaries in one rift level (kripp's video).

Conclusion

These are a combination of my suggestions, the overall community requests, and some specific people's suggestions (such as Athene) compiled into a post about D3ROS' longevity. Please feel free to constructively criticize and hope that Blizz sees this!

Edit: Grammar

I like the enthusiasm and I like a lot of where the ideas are going. That being said, like others have mentioned, atleast in a typical forum-induced heavily negative and unproductive manner, that they could be reworked into something a little more realistic clearer. I think trading is important to a lot of us, I know its extremely important to me, and I would like to see a way to trade some of the really cool stuff we find. Without trading, it just feels like I'm playing some kind of static RPG off-line on my Playstation or something. When making these suggestions it's extremely important to keep in mind the ways it can be exploited, as others have mentioned. While it may be a fantastic method if everyone were honest and forthright, the ways you described simply leave a lot of room to be manipulated, and thats exactly what we need to avoid going into RoS.

It would be cool to see a trade limit on items. Maybe it can only exchange hands but three times before it's account bound. This would be particularly interesting to me because it leaves some flexibility and uncertainty (which is crucial) for the price of the items to fluctuate because of the remaining opportunities it has to be exchanged. For example, an item may be valued its highest with 2 or 3 opportunities to trade, being an exceptional piece of equipment, as it reaches its final trade limit, it may decrease or increase, because there is the realization that it can no longer be traded. I think a system like this would work best if it said how many exchanges were left on the item description tag.

To build on this further, I think another way of limiting would be to limit how many times gems could be socketed or resocketed (with the "theory" being that every time you resocket/desocket you figuratively (not literally affecting the item) degrade the item until the ability to contain a gem is no longer available) Again, a system like this would be best if it were displayed in the item description how many more resockets the item could handle. What we need here is a funnel of equipment. We would need new items entering the market, and items exiting the market permanently. Systems like this need balance, what we had in Diablo 3 Vanilla was an excruciating amount of items entering the market every day, the effective 99% (anything below the very very best equipment), which would lose value guaranteed in combination with the fact that the best items never expired or left the market. There was such a massive influx of mediocre and crap gear that the best gear would perpetually get more and more valuable and more and more rare. We need a better distribution curve of the items. They have taken measures to address this in part in RoS so we will see how that goes, but we really won't know without the hard data that we get from just having the game out and playing it for hours and hours mulitiplied by the millions of players.

How convenient that your AH example disregards the fact that the game is balanced around it.
After the game is balanced around self-found, if some people still want to ruin their own fun by taking shortcuts, be my guest. I won't shed a tear for you.

Brilliant concept of a game.
Keep looking for this special item you always wanted, when you have it, the game is over because you are bored after a couple of days using it.

I hope you see the problem in that, because it is the problem D3 has right now. There is nothing to do, but to farm, farm some more and then you are done, farm even more and RoS looks the same, just self self found single player mode, but you can farm rifts and farm some more rifts and then farm some more rifts!

There is just a lack of an end game concept, it should be like this:

Now I have that missing piece of the gear I always wanted, the true game can begin now, which I will enjoy for months to come (it doesn't matter how I got it, bought it from hard earned money I deserved from doing a great job, grinded days for it playing the game, or made a trade for an equal item).
This is how it should look like and not how the above example looks like.

It has nothing to do with an AH or the economy or hackers/bots whatever, there is just no end game, which really excites you and pulls you in, because it's all just farming.

It is so funny that a lot of people don't realize this and look for some scape goat, why this game has no end game purpose. It's not the bots or the economy it is the lack of an end game and the concept this game is based on, there is just nothing to play for, the only thing players play for in this game is for farming more efficiently, by the looks of it nothing will change with the release of RoS, the same all over again.

The best of it, if you want a challenge you can still restrict yourself to play self found, no one is stopping you from doing that, it has again absolutely nothing to do with bots.

I'm not sure that everyone's main goal in Diablo is to close the gap. In my opinion, finding cool items myself is the goal. I want to say that I did that. Not that some code did that and then I paid the botter for it. If items are too readily available through botting, the purpose of farming endgame becomes pointless, since trading with a botter/botting is easier. It's the same problem that happened with the AH, items being too easy to acquire.

I'm not sure that everyone's main goal in Diablo is to close the gap. In my opinion, finding cool items myself is the goal. I want to say that I did that. Not that some code did that and then I paid the botter for it. If items are too readily available through botting, the purpose of farming endgame becomes pointless, since trading with a botter/botting is easier. It's the same problem that happened with the AH, items being too easy to acquire.

The goal of some people is.
How does it matter if some bot found it or some efficient farmer found the item?

Either way you can pay both with ingame gold, it's only a matter of time till items lose their value, bots just accelerate the process. The concept of an end game, which is solely based on farming to farm some more is just flawed that's all, that is what you are feeling now.

Farming should be a purpose to get the gear you want, to be ready for some end game, but there is none.

If you want to have purpose farming you still can, just play self found or with people who enjoy doing exactly that, then you will have still a lot of fun if you are really enjoy that. There are even people doing this in HC MP10 so it's possible to do it, it's not like you can't progress anymore like it was in the first release days.

3rd party site buys 101 accounts. 99 of them are sub botters and are friends with each other putting their list to 98. They all then friend one special bot, and all 100 accounts are linked at 99 /100 friends. That special bot now friends the alpha account, who is now at 1/100 friends. If the website wants to link every batch of farming accounts, then every alpha account will be at 3/100 friends, and there can be as many alpha accounts as the site can buy. You're friends with one of the thousands, you have access to the entire bot economy.

Edit; reworded for clarity.

Well then maybe an item can only be traded once, making it useful to that first person, but then removing it from the economy. I believe that would solve a lot of the issues everyone is talking about.

Now I have that missing piece of the gear I always wanted, the true game can begin now, which I will enjoy for months to come (it doesn't matter how I got it, bought it from hard earned money I deserved from doing a great job, grinded days for it playing the game, or made a trade for an equal item).
This is how it should look like and not how the above example looks like.

That's a great concept, but I haven't seen any good suggestions on how to execute it. It's sort of like a unicorn in that it can't really exist (so far since at least I haven't seen anything on how to execute this). Do you have anything specific in mind?

I like the enthusiasm and I like a lot of where the ideas are going. That being said, like others have mentioned, atleast in a typical forum-induced heavily negative and unproductive manner, that they could be reworked into something a little more realistic clearer. I think trading is important to a lot of us, I know its extremely important to me, and I would like to see a way to trade some of the really cool stuff we find. Without trading, it just feels like I'm playing some kind of static RPG off-line on my Playstation or something. When making these suggestions it's extremely important to keep in mind the ways it can be exploited, as others have mentioned. While it may be a fantastic method if everyone were honest and forthright, the ways you described simply leave a lot of room to be manipulated, and thats exactly what we need to avoid going into RoS.

It would be cool to see a trade limit on items. Maybe it can only exchange hands but three times before it's account bound.

I totally agree that an item can only be traded once or twice or maybe three times and then it goes account bound. I think that could solve a lot of issues. Not all of them, just a lot of them.

3rd party site buys 101 accounts. 99 of them are sub botters and are friends with each other putting their list to 98. They all then friend one special bot, and all 100 accounts are linked at 99 /100 friends. That special bot now friends the alpha account, who is now at 1/100 friends. If the website wants to link every batch of farming accounts, then every alpha account will be at 3/100 friends, and there can be as many alpha accounts as the site can buy. You're friends with one of the thousands, you have access to the entire bot economy.

So, what you're saying is that MILLIONS of people should not be able to trade because a couple thousand botters might make a "botters trade network?"

Flawless victory. It's that kind of knee-jerk reaction that leads to very nearsighted "solutions" to "problems."

Botters are bad. They are against the EULA and ToS. They should be dealt with. Period. But the game shouldn't be designed to punish the rest of us because of botters. That's complete madness. That's allowing the inmates to run the asylum and it's simply not how things should be done.

Imagine if Blizzard came out tomorrow and said "we've become aware that Bounties are easily-exploitable by botters, therefore we're removing them." You wouldn't settle for that explanation. You wouldn't settle for something you enjoy being removed simply because botters were exploiting it. You'd (rightly) tell Blizzard to crack down on botters and not to ruin your fun.

That's a great concept, but I haven't seen any good suggestions on how to execute it. It's sort of like a unicorn in that it can't really exist (so far since at least I haven't seen anything on how to execute this). Do you have anything specific in mind?

Suggestions are there already:

- Free economy, nothing should be BoA, it forces you to farm and farm and farm, especially when builds will be dependent on items, I don't understand how people can't see it, if you wanna get rich go out in the real world and farm some real world money, aka. WORK!
If you wanna farm forever to farm, play in self found mode and your problem is solved already.
- PvP
- PvPvE
- Special ladder leagues, see PoE
- Special maps, see PoE (Rifts could be good, but not the way they are designed now)
- Build diversity, well there i hope something is coming in RoS with crushing blow and cool down reduction, they need to add more diversity though another passive skill tree (paragon could be that) or rune words etc. etc. see D2, PoE

Unfortunately the system is a bit flawed already, just imagine Gandalf's magic powers depending on a 2h-Axe, when you know what I'm talking about.

Botters are bad. They are against the EULA and ToS. They should be dealt with. Period. But the game shouldn't be designed to punish the rest of us because of botters. That's complete madness. That's allowing the inmates to run the asylum and it's simply not how things should be done.

They can write what they want into a ToS/EULA it will not stand in any court, they could write that people with red noses, huge asses or bold people are against their ToS/EULA it would obviously not stand in court.

"Botters are bad." you say that like this is a proven fact or "the truth", it might be your truth, but it's just some public opinion 95% of the people are convinced of and a limiting belief nothing more. Bots just do the stuff, which is not really fun for anyone or generate some value for their owner. It's not inherently bad it's a way to avoid farming for people who are not enjoying repetitive procedure or people who make a business out of it.

The issue with Free economy is you get the same issue you have right now, to many players = insanely low drop chances = get nothing from actually playing.

If nothing was bound, and the drop chances were high enough thatd ud get something from just a few hours of playing you could pretty much get every item u wanted in 1 day by trading of anything you got that you didn't want... So it's either have free economy but have to spend 2 weeks+ farming to get 1 decent item or have no trading but actually get drops at a decent rate.

3rd party site buys 101 accounts. 99 of them are sub botters and are friends with each other putting their list to 98. They all then friend one special bot, and all 100 accounts are linked at 99 /100 friends. That special bot now friends the alpha account, who is now at 1/100 friends. If the website wants to link every batch of farming accounts, then every alpha account will be at 3/100 friends, and there can be as many alpha accounts as the site can buy. You're friends with one of the thousands, you have access to the entire bot economy.

So, what you're saying is that MILLIONS of people should not be able to trade because a couple thousand botters might make a "botters trade network?"

Flawless victory. It's that kind of knee-jerk reaction that leads to very nearsighted "solutions" to "problems."

Botters are bad. They are against the EULA and ToS. They should be dealt with. Period. But the game shouldn't be designed to punish the rest of us because of botters. That's complete madness. That's allowing the inmates to run the asylum and it's simply not how things should be done.

Imagine if Blizzard came out tomorrow and said "we've become aware that Bounties are easily-exploitable by botters, therefore we're removing them." You wouldn't settle for that explanation. You wouldn't settle for something you enjoy being removed simply because botters were exploiting it. You'd (rightly) tell Blizzard to crack down on botters and not to ruin your fun.

The issue with Free economy is you get the same issue you have right now, to many players = insanely low drop chances = get nothing from actually playing.

If nothing was bound, and the drop chances were high enough thatd ud get something from just a few hours of playing you could pretty much get every item u wanted in 1 day by trading of anything you got that you didn't want... So it's either have free economy but have to spend 2 weeks+ farming to get 1 decent item or have no trading but actually get drops at a decent rate.

I agree with everything else.

This is exactly why trading should be limited to our clan, or your friends list when the item is dropped, or one trade per item. I think something needs to be done because trading is a part of the endgame, it is what will help D3ROS' longevity.

Edit: Maybe using horadric caches for trading could be cool. For example: Here I'll exchange this Azurewrath for 8 h caches. Could pay off, might not.

I can't imagine how you could be so dismissive and blaise about any subject. It's really put-offish.

There's no reason Blizzard should be designing the game around what botters do. They don't do it in WoW, they shouldn't do it in D3. People bot for herbs/ore in WoW all the time. Blizzard doesn't remove all herbs and ore and related professions from the game. They deal with the botters as best they can. Period. It's a very simple concept, and you're obviously smart enough to understand it.

There's nothing utopian about it, not when you have a game where millions of people play and have varying things they enjoy. You don't simply attack every "problem" with a machete. Arm hurts? AMPUTATE IMMEDIATELY! Minor abrasion on your foot? AMPUTATE! Someone keyed your car? SEND IT TO THE SCRAP HEAP! No one actually thinks like that. You don't throw the baby out with the bath water. It's just a bad thing to do.

Imagine if my response to your idea about Nephalem Rifts was "you're living in Utopia" and basically told you to stop making suggestions on how to improve the game because it's imperfect and always will be. I mean, the game never will be perfect, so let's just not try to improve it. That kind of defeatest attitude is stupid... and you're only acting like that because you fail to understand that this issue does matter to lots of players (a poll on incgamers suggests that 60% of people want a less-restrictive solution than what is currently implemented and also suggests that hard-line BoA advocates are barely even the plurality of those polled). That is far too large of a number to simply ignore and play off as if it's some minority who is just trying to ruin the game for you. The "BoA or die" crowd is, actually, the minority. Why? Because the sane majority is fucking fed up with these extreme black-and-white solutions to problems.

I still have to see a compelling argument that trading has anything to do with boosting the longevity of the game. On the contrary, even.

D2 would like to speak with you. The game that set the bar for longevity... had trading. The idea that trading causes massive harm to longevity is not only overblown, but completely contrary to history. Sure, maybe more people would have played D2 for longer if there was no trading... but maybe more people would have gotten frustrated about RNG and quit sooner too.

It's a double-edged sword. Trading expedites certain things for a certain group of players. But for another group it acts as a safety net against RNG. You are only looking at it from one perspective, though. You are not acknowledging that the lack of that safety net might actually cause people to quit the game too. Both things are not good for longevity - but both things are fairly minor in the grand scheme of things.

That's why my perspective, from the get-go, is that instead of socially-engineering the game, Blizzard should be giving us the "sandbox" that was D2. They took a major step towards this with Adventure Mode, but took an even bigger step backwards with BoA. D2 was amazing because it didn't tell us how to play even though it obviously needed a bit more balance. In fact, the only major example as to how D2 failed to provide freedom was the OP ladder runewords (which is also why I'm against ladder-specific rewards that aren't cosmetic).

D2 was so successful because it didn't say "you can't trade" or "you must trade."

D3 started out with "you must trade (or close to it)" because of the AH and has now migrated to "you can't trade." This harsh juxtaposition with how D2 handled the subject (by specifically NOT handling it at all) is troubling to anyone with a memory of the past. The AH was an experiment, and hopefully Blizzard learned from it. I just don't see going to the other extreme as a reasonable solution. It reminds me of American politics. People who seek middle-ground solutions are spurned. Everyone has to pander to their constituency and the more extreme you are about your beliefs the better it works out... even if that is decidedly against the interests of the average people.